Violence

Violence is a concept that continues to be hotly disputed. Various theorisations of violence have attempted to define, identify, provide hierarchies of seriousness, reduce, or allow for moral judgements of incidents, and to account for the variety of violent practices by vectors of difference—age, gender, class, race, disability, ethnicity, and so on. Overall, theories that attempt to ‘explain’ the occurrence of violence and its various iterations are less fruitful than those theories that attempt to ‘classify’ or evaluate the ethical implications of violence. In other words, rather than attempting to say why violence happens (i.e., causation), theories that give us tools to view violence as differential, contextual, and dynamic present more compelling arguments. This is due to the multiple and overlapping factors that make up ...